The People Who Illustrate

Recently routed to an art and illustration site called Gorilla Art Fare. They’re sufficiently popular that they don’t need a link through from me, but you won’t be disappointed if you take a moment to go there right now. Of particular interest to this bit of writing is any video of an artist doing his thing. There were several near the top today and I suspect will be more in the future so I’ll leave the hunting to you. Find one. Watch it.

My somewhat recent fascination with the parallels between illustration and writing comes from my reading of a book I gave as a gift. “Making Comics” by Scott McCloud is great for understanding story telling from a visual perspective. More generally I began to see how his specific instructions to artists were practical for writers as well. More about that another time. That’s just some groundwork for where this all started for me.

Two videos floored me. Each showed hours of work in Photoshop compressed to a few minutes. Despite the scaling you could easily see the repetitive and experimental nature of the work. In one the artist paints a face by first painting in the background color of pale mustard–same as the final product. After a bit of indistinct strokes for the face he completely trashes the background with a grey blue. For much of the first half of the video the face looks like a young man of little worldly experience. By the end, the background color has changed at least three times and the portrait of an angry veteran soldier comes to mind. Everything was questioned during the process. Hair color, head shape, ear placement, mustache, lips, eyes, collar, everything. It all took shape, got cast aside, and then reconstituted.

I can’t imagine wholesale near repetition and experimentation like that going on with text to ultimately end up with the same thing just deeper and richer.